Stay Tuned: ‘9-1-1’ is oddly appealing

Melissa Crawley More Content Now

Tuesday

Jan 23, 2018 at 9:36 AMJan 23, 2018 at 12:44 PM

Ryan Murphy (“American Horror Story”) takes on first responders in “9-1-1,” a fast-paced procedural that focuses on the lives of firefighters, police officers and emergency call operators. Procedural is a loose term here and the case-of-the-week structure is so over the top that it’s hard not to get sucked in. A baby flushed down a toilet? Check. A snake strangling its attractive female owner who then flirts with a firefighter about five seconds after being disentangled? Check. Suicide jumper complete with wacky voiceover narration from a stressed 9-1-1 operator? Check and check.

Then there’s Angela Bassett as a hard-nosed cop named Athena who breaks the rules, in the name of good, of course, and scares all the rookie cops around her. She is joined by Peter Krause as Bobby, the veteran recovering alcoholic firefighter, who is trying to guide Evan “Buck” Buckley (Oliver Stark), the maverick newbie firefighter, to stop stealing firetrucks to hook up with random women and approach his work seriously. The crew also includes Howie (Kenneth Choi) and Henrietta (Aisha Hinds) who offer some dry humor. But the best line of the first episode, and what I think must be in some stoner movie script somewhere, is when Buck says to Bobby: “See the fire, put out the fire. The rest is blah blah.”

If only the rest was blah blah for anxiety-filled Abby (Connie Britton), the 911 dispatcher and occasional narrator. She points out to us that she rarely hears the conclusion of the calls she answers. Did help arrive in time? Did the person live or die? But Abby isn’t too worried because she feels more comfortable dealing with the emergencies of strangers than she does dealing with the one at home, which is a mother with Alzheimer’s disease. Or at least that’s what she says in voiceover as the suicide jumper plunges to her death. It’s an odd cut but this is an odd show. Then again, that’s kind of the appeal.

For every firefighter cutting off the head of a snake or line of exposition made to sound like dramatic declarative (“You were a 37-year-old single woman whose biological clock was running out!”), there are satisfying emotional moments like when Abby talks a scared girl through a home invasion and Bobby confesses to a priest. The show, I’m fairly sure, is meant to explore how first responders face the pressures of their jobs and it does, just from a more eccentric perspective than other shows have in the past. That’s a good reason to watch it.

Connie Britton is another. She’s solid as Abby and the one character you want to get to know. She’s easy to root for because Britton is so watchable. Hopefully, Abby will get more screen time and Buck “is that why they call you firehose?” will be relegated to quick moments of comic relief.

“9-1-1” is on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. EDT on Fox.— Melissa Crawley is the author of “Mr. Sorkin Goes to Washington: Shaping the President on Television’s ‘The West Wing.’” She has a Ph.D. in media studies and is a member of the Television Critics Association. To comment on Stay Tuned, email her at staytuned@outlook.com or follow her on Twitter at @MelissaCrawley.